Hello Art, I just came across your post - very clear analysis. I would add that the choice depends a lot on the goal and use case. We looked at publishing for marketing purposes as a use case, and our conclusion, when comparing PDFs, flipbooks, native apps, websites and web apps, was that the two latter ones are best suited for (content) marketeers. If you want to have a look, we summarized our findings in this free guide: http://bestcontentmarketingtool.readz.com/ - Thanks, Bart

You should do neither responsive or a mobile app. A very , very high percentage of businesses do not need a mobile app. It can be expensive and just not necessary. Business owners need to keep in mind such thing is "mobile space" on consumer cellphones. People are not going to download an app for every business they go to. It makes more sense to build an adaptive mobile website. A company that has a patent-pending software and builds these is WompMobile. Check them out at www.wompmobile.com and they have a mobile website emulator for businesses to test their website as well, for free.

I don't even download apps that I could really use anymore because 1) of the time and hassle of looking for and downloading (and, sometimes, updating -- and then dealing with ramifications of updating) apps, and 2) because I've forgotten and had to change my password enough times that it's easier to just live without new apps.

Agreed with the author about apps w/ special features (like mobile banking and prescription scanning). All too often, however, a website's app is simply a limited-feature version of its webpage. It's only useful if you use those limited features so much that it actually saves you a significant amount of time to touch the app icon than it does to go to the website in your mobile browser.

Interesting commentary. I don't download many apps on my smartphone, just a few I consider essential. So I do traverse the mobile web a lot, and it's always annoying to go to a site that isn't mobile-optimized.

Right - and not just habit, it's easy to have multiple tabs open in a browser on a tablet and jump among them. Apps are more appealing on smartphones, I admit, but most people do only so many tasks with a phone. Not arguing against really useful apps, but it shouldn't be the default route.

I keep telling my wife there's a Weather.com app on our iPad, but she keeps navigating to the site on Safari. People are creatures of habit.

Another caution from personal experience: When Capital One acquired ING Direct, they replaced one app with another. ING used a phone-dial-pad style virtual keyboard for entering login information. On Capital One's app, you use the device's pop-up QWERTY keyboard to enter that same login information. Needless to say, my password wasn't working until I realized I was thinking letters (as in 5=JKL) while the app was expecting numbers. I wonder how many customer service calls they had to field on that one!

I blame developers who complain and whine about HTML5 and insist that their app for Joe's Bait & Pork Rind Emporium absolutely needs to be native. Everyone wants to be special, but at some point it's a waste of money and time.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.